Re: Dublin Protestants

Originally Posted by cropbeye

Originally Posted by Kalif

Originally Posted by Liverpoolblue

I was reading about the song "Come out you Black and Tans" and it mentioned that the song makes reference to a Dublin protestant working class who had been Black and Tans. It made it sound like they faded away or something over time. Did they intermarry or move out? What happened to them are they still there?

Lb

After independence most Protestants in the south were made to feel more then unwelcome, some were driven out, most moved north or to the mainland.

As dev said, it was a Catholic country for a Catholic people.

Absolute bollocks1

There is an element of truth to it, but perhaps not to the extent put forward by the poster. One only need look to the Mayo librarian incident of the 1930s. It was by no means the main factor in Protestant migration mind you.

Re: Dublin Protestants

Whats debatable is how purposefully the state went about creating a cold house for Protestants but the fact of the matter is that regardless of that, Protestants did feel like they weren't welcome. Personally, I don't think there is any doubt that the way the state was run contributed to the decline of the Protestant population and sometimes it even encouraged and helped that decline through various actions and non-actions. Prehaps that was, as some would have seen it, just an added bonus.

Re: Dublin Protestants

Its being used as a dishonest attempt by revisionists to try to portray that the south was equally

regressive to Protestants as the Northern Orange state was to Roman Catholics between 1922 and 1977.

In fact during the fifties and sixties there were often job advertismens in Dublin which read

C of I preferred.

Very true. There were lots of places in Dublin - including Guinesses where a Catholic (or a Jew for that matter) could not get a job above menial level. Gay Byrne's brother Al was first RC to join Guinness management and the Byrnes were awful west Brit lick arses!

Re: Dublin Protestants

Of my 2 grandfathers, one was from Dublin, the son of a protestant couple who converted to catholicism in the late 19th century. He was in the IRA. The other was from Monaghan catholic farmers. He was in the RIC.

Re: Dublin Protestants

Originally Posted by QuizMaster

Of my 2 grandfathers, one was from Dublin, the son of a protestant couple who converted to catholicism in the late 19th century. He was in the IRA. The other was from Monaghan catholic farmers. He was in the RIC.

Re: Dublin Protestants

Originally Posted by locke

The Protestant community declined for a number of reasons.

The British Armed Forces left. A lot of the apparently sharp decline in the 1920s is because of that.

The First World War disproportionately affected the Protestant community. A lot were killed and a lot of the women of the era "married out" or stayed single because of the gender imbalance in young Protestant numbers during the 1920s. Combine this with Ne Temere and it has a significant impact on future generations.

Some felt uncomfortable in the new state and moved north of the border or to Britain. A programme which allowed Irish civil servants to move to the British civil service would have been a factor there as well.

There were unfortunately a small number of attacks on Protestants around the time of independence, which also encouraged some to leave. However, given the small scale and the fact it was confined to a few very specific localities, I think this tends to get overstated by some for political reasons now.

Historically, the Protestant birth rate was lower and when the Irish population was stagnant due to emigration, the fact the Protestants proportions were lowering produced a smaller community.

Ne temere meant that the children of mixed marriages were likely to be brought up catholic.

But as said above, the Protestant community is still there and numbers seem to have stabilised among the native Protestant population, while being swelled by immigration, so the future isn't as grim as it had once appeared.

Do you think an increase in the population of protestants in the south would in some way be a step towards a united Ireland by making the south more inviting to NI protestants?

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